Feedback regarding yesterday's Essential Core Systems IT maintenance announcement
IT Communications
Dear Faculty General Managers and IT Managers,
In response to a number of enquiries relating to yesterday's Essential Core Systems IT maintenance announcement. The following responses will hopefully help address those concerns.
What is the work being carried out?
MQ has made an investment to replace the aged Corporate Disks Storage System (often called SAN- Storage Access Network), that hold most faculty, user shares and Corporate applications data (web sites, AMIS, HR). The existing SAN is end of life and the new system will put the University into a position to better support the clients into the future. The data on the SAN is used by the file servers that serve the data to the user via applications, file shares etc.
The work being undertaken this Sunday is part one of a larger body of work connecting the new system to the old. This work is being undertaken by the Vendor and is non-intrusive and low risk. The current system has fully redundancy and with two separate paths (Path A and B) to the servers and applications that serve the data to the users. The risks to end services provided by these systems are very very low due to the high reliance in-built to the product and the two path connectivity.
What systems will it affect?
NO systems are expected to be impacted, although from 08:45 - 09:30 and 11:30 - 12:15 we may see some slowing in applications responsiveness on AMIS, HR – Corporate applications.
NO Networks, City Campus services or Teaching and Learning systems are included in this work and are totally separate to this activity. Access and service from these are not impacted by this activity.
What is the risk?
The risks in this work are: slowness from 08:45 - 09:30 and 11:30 - 12:15. Sunday morning has been chosen to further reduce any risks as this is a quiet time for Corporate applications usage.
Due to the specialist nature of the work Vendor Technical experts are undertaking the work with our technical specialists onsite.
Will the network or teaching technologies be affected in any way?
NO Networks, City Campus services or Teaching and Learning systems are included in this work and are totally separate to this activity. Access and service from these are not impacted by this activity.
Why was such short notice given with this announcement?
This work was always programed but due to University priorities and a recent SAN failure in the Science and Engineering Faculty, it has been brought forward.
Why wasn't this type of announcement communicated to everyone?
Due to the 'emergency' nature of this maintenance, an announcement had to be sent asap. The only 'global' channel to communicate with MQ staff is the This Week newsletter, which is published only once a week (normally on a Tuesday), meaning we didn’t have the opportunity to use this communication channel for this message.
(Note: due to the low impact of this maintenance, this message did not qualify for an all staff MQ announcement email).
Thank you for the feedback regarding the USA date on Twitter. Although the date and AEDT displayed are correct, we will look into changing the date format to reflect dd/mm/yyyy.
Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused and we appreciate your cooperation.
To remind those again, Essential Core Systems maintenance is taking place this Sunday 23rd October from 8.00am to 2pm. Faculty IT representatives should forward this information within your Faculty/Office to advise your colleagues.
There may be some systems slowness during the nominated time periods but NO service disruptions are expected during the execution of this work.
Stay informed:
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IT Maintenance Window calendar |
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Real time notifications for operational status of all IT systems and services |
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Twitter for breaking alerts and status updates |
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Contact the IT Service Desk for personalised service |
02 9850 HELP (4357), or email one...@mq.edu.au. |
Best regards,
Grant Sayer
Director of Infrastructure & Applications
Information Technology | Level 3, 75 Talavera Road
Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
T: +61 2 9850 1539 | F: +61 2 9850 1570 | mq.edu.au
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